BFE Annual Conference - Registration Open

British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Annual Conference

University of Sheffield, 20-23 April 2017

Registration is now open for the 2017 Annual Conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology: please visit the University of Sheffield’s Online Store (http://onlineshop.shef.ac.uk/conferences-events/faculty-of-arts-and-huma...). Early Bird registration rates are only available until 10 March, after which all the prices will increase by 10%, so be sure to register in good time. Please also make sure your BFE Membership (https://bfe.org.uk/join-bfe) is current to take advantage of the lower conference rates for members.

We would like to invite you especially to take part in the Conference Dinner (http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/music/research/conferences/bfe-2017/dinner-party) on the Saturday evening. The venue is Inox Dine on the top floor of the University of Sheffield’s prize-winning Students’ Union, with fine views over the city and a menu that has won rave reviews on TripAdvisor and elsewhere. The traditional BFE party and jam session will follow immediately in the same venue. The event offers delegates an opportunity to meet together in a dedicated venue with lots of room for circulating and socialising, in preference to Sheffield’s city centre restaurants which can be very full on a Saturday night. The dinner is available for the extremely reasonable cost of £30 for waged attendees and £20 for student and unwaged attendees, bookable at registration through the Online Store, and you are welcome to reserve additional places for spouses or other companions.

Another highlight of the conference is the Friday evening concert by tabla master Yogesh Samshi, whose playing the Washington Post has called “as intricate as a Bach fugue and as ecstatic as a rave-club crescendo.” Tickets are being offered to conference delegates at the reduced price of £10, or £6 for students, again through the Online Store.

We are delighted to announce that this year’s Keynote Speaker will be Professor Michael Bakan of Florida State University. As the author of a much-acclaimed monograph on a very modern form of traditional music (Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur, Chicago, 2000), a composer of new music using traditional instruments and resources, and author of the widely-used textbook World Music: Traditions and Transformations, Professor Bakan is ideally qualified to offer insights on our conference’s special “talking point”, Tradition Today. The title of his Keynote Speech is “The Moral of the Story: Making Ethnomusicology Matter in the 21st Century”.

The conference will be held in the University of Sheffield’s new Diamond building, a state-of-the-art teaching and conference facility immediately adjacent to the Music Department. While there is no mandatory conference theme, the BFE conference is immediately preceded by a one-day conference at Sheffield (19 April 2017) that culminates a large-scale research project on Digital Folk (https://www.digitalfolk.org/digital-folk-conference/). We envisage that some delegates will wish to attend both events and that one strand of discussion at the BFE conference will expand the focus of the one-day conference by connecting it with broader explorations of “Tradition Today”. At the same time, we welcome presentations of new research in any area of ethnomusicology.